1. Technical Field
Present invention embodiments relate to the ranking of search results for network content by a search engine, in particular ranking of URL results for a search of the internet.
2. Discussion of Related Art
Search engines can utilize a number of different strategies and algorithms for prioritizing or ranking content associated with a search query. In particular, search engines which search the internet or other types of networks prioritize or rank links to uniform resource locators (URLs) based upon content associated with such URLs that is deemed relevant to a search query input by a user.
Social networks have become increasingly popular over the years. Many features of social media have developed, such as social groups or communities that allow members of a social network to follow other members and view content of interest or deemed relevance to the member being followed. For example, in the Twitter social network, followers can retweet (RT) content to their followers, and their followers RT the content to further followers, and so on. Content that can be retweeted in Twitter (or posted from one member to other members in other forms of social media) includes the posting of URLs.
Certain types of content can gain popularity rapidly at social network cites (e.g., trending topics). For example, in a Twitter environment, the number of RTs that may occur for a particular URL can increase in a rapid manner in a relatively short period of time, in particular depending upon the status of the originator of a tweet including the URL and the number of followers of the originator. Thus, the relevance of a URL can quickly increase within a social network environment. However, current search engines do not take into consideration the influence of posts (e.g., tweets or RTs) on access to content in ranking the relevance of URLs associated with such content.